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[clav]

I've been using NAS from TomatoUSB since I have quite a number of 2.5" hard drives lying around.

This + Windows 8 file history makes it a very affordable way of backing up although I probably need a station in the near future.

Used to run a Windows Home Server but that blew up on me.

Thought about Windows Server Essentials but that's just too expensive. Microsoft could put out something for home users in Nadella-age, but we'll see.

Leaning towards Synology although I will have to save up for one. $1000 for a 4 drive + station setup.

 

[Marty Chinn]

I've been using NAS from TomatoUSB since I have quite a number of 2.5" hard drives lying around.

This + Windows 8 file history makes it a very affordable way of backing up although I probably need a station in the near future.

Used to run a Windows Home Server but that blew up on me.

Thought about Windows Server Essentials but that's just too expensive. Microsoft could put out something for home users in Nadella-age, but we'll see.

Leaning towards Synology although I will have to save up for one. $1000 for a 4 drive + station setup.

Are you including hard drives in that price or just the NAS?

 

[clav]

Are you including hard drives in that price or just the NAS?

Including hard drives.

Thinking about 4TB/drive.

 

[Marty Chinn]

Including hard drives.

Thinking about 4TB/drive.

Ah, heh going with all new drives out the gate sure adds up quick. I had to get five new drives in order to go with a two drive redundancy since you have to configure that upfront. It definitely hit the wallet but so far I've got no regrets.

The Synology is quieter than my old WHS setup and the OS seems great so far. I think the fear of resolving file conflicts due to failing hard drives moved me away from WHS. They were always a pain to deal with and the sluggish console that was unresponsive sometimes was a pain too. I loved WHS but I think after 6+ years it was time to try something new.

I know you're debating the same dilemma that I just went through so feel free to ask me anything if you've got questions.

 

[Deleted member 12837]

Ok now that there's a bit more activity in this thread again, I'll try this one more time before putting it up on eBay. Please someone take this off of my hands (much easier to deal with people on GAF). I'm not looking for much.

Anyone interested in buying an empty HP Mediasmart EX495? I'm looking to switch to something smaller and simpler. Seeling it "empty" because I think the system drive is corrupt. See my post below for more details:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=99917993&postcount=371

I haven't really had the time since I posted this to recover data off the drives or buy a new system drive to try to do a restore. I would love to just sell the hardware as-is, but if it's a dealbreaker I can find some time to get it up and running again before unloading it.

 

[Friggz]

QNAP NAS with Atom processors had tearing issues with HDMI-out. Not sure if it was ever fixed.

I'd recommend the TS-451. I've got the 2-bay version (TS-251) and it works perfectly and does everything I need. Just make sure you get the 4GB RAM version so you can use Virtualization Station. It uses a dual-core Celeron and I haven't noticed any tearing when using XBMC.

man, that qnap is real nice.

what are the odds that a nas will be on sale after black friday? ive been in the market for one for about a year now and i need to stop procrastinating before i lose everything.

 

[industrian]

man, that qnap is real nice.

The potential for Virtualization Station is near-endless. I can only run one VM at a time due to hardware constraints, but it's more than enough to run a Wordpress server, an XP machine or for me to experiment with Magento or whatever.

The way Intel is shrinking their processors though, the hardware in household/small-office NAS models is going to get real crazy real soon.

what are the odds that a nas will be on sale after black friday? ive been in the market for one for about a year now and i need to stop procrastinating before i lose everything.

I figure that it's as good a time as any for a stock clearance.

But if you're concerned about costs, it's the hard drives you should be looking at. They cost just as much (if not more) than the NAS.

 

[Deleted member 12837]

So I bought an external HDD dock like Marty recommended a while back and managed to recover the majority of my data. The only drive remaining I haven't been able to access is the system drive. It just doesn't seem to want to mount or let me browse the contents.

When I open Disk Utility in OS X I see 2 partitions: SYS (~20-30 GB) and then an unnamed second partition that fills the rest of the 500 GB of space on the drive. I think there might be some data on that other partition that was not present on the other drives, but I don't know for sure.

Any tips on how to get to the data?

 

[Friggz]

The potential for Virtualization Station is near-endless. I can only run one VM at a time due to hardware constraints, but it's more than enough to run a Wordpress server, an XP machine or for me to experiment with Magento or whatever.

The way Intel is shrinking their processors though, the hardware in household/small-office NAS models is going to get real crazy real soon.



I figure that it's as good a time as any for a stock clearance.

But if you're concerned about costs, it's the hard drives you should be looking at. They cost just as much (if not more) than the NAS.

i was looking at the price of western digital red (4tb), are those drives still the way to go?

hitachi also seems like a solid drive with minimul failure rates.

seagate drives scare me from personal reasons, and reviews on their nas drives seem to back up my concerns. 10% annual failure rate!??

 

[RangersFan]

i was looking at the price of western digital red (4tb), are those drives still the way to go?

been running 5 of them in my synology DS1513+ for about 13 months straight now without any issues.

 

[Marty Chinn]

So I bought an external HDD dock like Marty recommended a while back and managed to recover the majority of my dad. The only drive remaining I haven't been able to access is the system drive. It just doesn't seem to want to mount or let me browse the contents.

When I open Disk Utility in OS X I see 2 partitions: SYS (~20-30 GB) and then an unnamed second partition that fills the rest of the 500 GB of space on the drive. I think there might be some data on that other partition that was not present on the other drives, but I don't know for sure.

Any tips on how to get to the data?

I'm glad that suggestion worked for getting most of your stuff recovered. Did you have data duplication turned on the WHS? If so, there's unlikely anything on that last drive that you don't have already cuz in theory the data should have been on two different drives. If data duplication wasn't turned on, then yes it's possible there is stuff on there. WHS is supposed to use that drive last for putting data on, but if you were pretty full then there's likely data on there that you need to recover.

WHS splits the system drive into two partitions. The first is the C drive which is the system, which is the 20-30GB you see, and then the other partition is D which has the drive extender data on there. From everything I've read, you should be able to still just hook it up and read it. If the drive was going bad and that's why the WHS was dying, then it's possible that the data might not be accessible. I would try finding a Windows computer to see if you can plug it in and see the second partition rather than on a Mac. Also you need to make sure hidden files are viewable in Windows because WHS stores the data in a hidden folder.

I've tried a quick Google search and nothing seemed unique about making it hard to get the data off the system drive. Good luck.

 

[mrklaw]

man, that qnap is real nice.

what are the odds that a nas will be on sale after black friday? ive been in the market for one for about a year now and i need to stop procrastinating before i lose everything.

There is a TS-453 just come out too, which is a quad core celeron.mshould be much more suited to running eg a plex server with transcoding support, or a virtualisation at a decent speed.

 

[Furyous]

Does anyone have any advice on Raid 0 vs JBOD? I purchased the ts 451 as suggested and swapped out the seagate and western digital drives for two Hitachi 4TB solutions. Now I am in quite the situation. Should i use JBOD or Raid 0 for backing up files and as a digital media server?

 

[industrian]

Unless you're using it for a very specific purpose, I would never recommend using RAID 0 on a NAS.

 

[Marty Chinn]

Does anyone have any advice on Raid 0 vs JBOD? I purchased the ts 451 as suggested and swapped out the seagate and western digital drives for two Hitachi 4TB solutions. Now I am in quite the situation. Should i use JBOD or Raid 0 for backing up files and as a digital media server?

If I'm not mistaken, neither of those have any redundancy to protect against drive failure.

 

[Vipershark]

I wasn't sure where else to post this so I figured that this would go best in here.

My dad has wanted a centralized place on the network to back up and store all of his music (and my mom's pictures) for a pretty long time. Recently, I took an unused 2003-spec computer that we had sitting around and installed VortexBox on it so that he could easily rip his CDs and such to it. This also allows it to work as a media server for music easily and I've shown him how simple it is to stream music off of it or to up/download files across the network to whatever device he wants.

He liked it a lot, but he's been looking into wireless external hard drives as well as a solution. I don't know much about these wifi drives, so considering that they can't be used to rip cds (but can still store content) is there any advantage in using one over an old computer? Would it be able to stream content as opposed to just storing files?

 

[industrian]

I wasn't sure where else to post this so I figured that this would go best in here.

My dad has wanted a centralized place on the network to back up and store all of his music (and my mom's pictures) for a pretty long time. Recently, I took an unused 2003-spec computer that we had sitting around and installed VortexBox on it so that he could easily rip his CDs and such to it. This also allows it to work as a media server for music easily and I've shown him how simple it is to stream music off of it or to up/download files across the network to whatever device he wants.

He liked it a lot, but he's been looking into wireless external hard drives as well as a solution. I don't know much about these wifi drives, so considering that they can't be used to rip cds (but can still store content) is there any advantage in using one over an old computer? Would it be able to stream content as opposed to just storing files?

The advantages of a NAS compared to an older PC is that they are smaller and provide better performance with comparatively minuscule power requirements.

The disadvantages are the initial setup costs, including hard drives. That and - if you're planning to access them via the internet - setting up proper security settings.

You wouldn't be able to rip CDs directly to a NAS, but you could sync CD rips to it or transfer them easily. But you'd be able to stream everything stored on it throughout your LAN.

 

[Marty Chinn]

I wasn't sure where else to post this so I figured that this would go best in here.

My dad has wanted a centralized place on the network to back up and store all of his music (and my mom's pictures) for a pretty long time. Recently, I took an unused 2003-spec computer that we had sitting around and installed VortexBox on it so that he could easily rip his CDs and such to it. This also allows it to work as a media server for music easily and I've shown him how simple it is to stream music off of it or to up/download files across the network to whatever device he wants.

He liked it a lot, but he's been looking into wireless external hard drives as well as a solution. I don't know much about these wifi drives, so considering that they can't be used to rip cds (but can still store content) is there any advantage in using one over an old computer? Would it be able to stream content as opposed to just storing files?

The advantages would be less power, much more quiet, and easier to manage and maintain. A dedicated computer options up the possibility of doing more. One thing you want to do is make sure you have data redundancy so you don't lose things like pictures in the case of hard drive failure.

You wouldn't be able to rip CDs directly to a NAS, but you could sync CD rips to it or transfer them easily. But you'd be able to stream everything stored on it throughout your LAN.

Couldn't you just map it as a networked drive and point the destination to there when ripping? I don't see why you couldn't rip directly to it.

 

[Vipershark]

Just to clarify, I'm talking a wireless external hard drive, if that wasn't clear. I'm assuming that the drive itself is already built into the cost?

In what way would that be easier to maintain?
The computer is just running a barebones Linux distro which can be controlled either through SSH or a convenient web GUI, and if anything happens to it (assuming that the hard drive is physically okay) then really all it will need is a format and a restore from backup, right?
I'll have an external for redundancy, of course.

What happens if the wifi drive goes down? Can I fix it?

 

[Marty Chinn]

Just to clarify, I'm talking a wireless external hard drive, if that wasn't clear. I'm assuming that the drive itself is already built into the cost?

Yes

In what way would that be easier to maintain?
The computer is just running a barebones Linux distro which can be controlled either through SSH or a convenient web GUI, and if anything happens to it (assuming that the hard drive is physically okay) then really all it will need is a format and a restore from backup, right?
I'll have an external for redundancy, of course.

The very fact that it is a full fledge computer with various components adds complexity. There are things out there are are more like an appliance than a computer with parts designed and picked out to work together. Having gone both a build setup and a specialized premade device, I can appreciate the simplicity and headache free of not using a build computer. When things go wrong, they can be a huge pain. This is especially true when you're setting it up for your parents and not yourself.

What happens if the wifi drive goes down? Can I fix it?

What do you mean by going down? Like disconnected from the network, the drive dying or something else?

 

[Furyous]

I went with the JBOD solution but ran into another set of problems. It took 20 hours for the device to verify bad blocks on the new Hitachi 4 GB hard drives so I stopped the transfer. Hopefully I don't face any problems with this.

Is there a faster way to transfer large files on this QNAP Nas TS-451 device? I'm using file station to transfer 1.64 TB of "digital media content". Is there a faster way to do this?

 

[industrian]

Is there a faster way to transfer large files on this QNAP Nas TS-451 device? I'm using file station to transfer 1.64 TB of "digital media content". Is there a faster way to do this?

Are you transferring from USB storage or from ethernet?

If the latter, is it a gigabit ethernet?

 

[Furyous]

Are you transferring from USB storage or from ethernet?

If the latter, is it a gigabit ethernet?

I'm transferring from USB storage (external hard drive with data on it) to the Nas drive itself. Right now, I'm using QNAP's file transfer which uses wifi I think but I'm not sure. The NAS is connected directly via ethernet to my time capsule.

 

[Marty Chinn]

I'm transferring from USB storage (external hard drive with data on it) to the Nas drive itself. Right now, I'm using QNAP's file transfer which uses wifi I think but I'm not sure. The NAS is connected directly via ethernet to my time capsule.

Wait is the USB storage connected directly to the QNAP? Is it connected to your computer? Is it connected to some other computer that you're connecting to remotely to go to the QNAP? The path that the data flows through makes a world of a difference on how fast it transfers.

 

[industrian]

I'm transferring from USB storage (external hard drive with data on it) to the Nas drive itself. Right now, I'm using QNAP's file transfer which uses wifi I think but I'm not sure. The NAS is connected directly via ethernet to my time capsule.

I transferred things from my USB 3.0 drives that were physically plugged into the NAS so it was relatively quick.

Transferring large files via Wi-Fi sounds potentially slow depending on what standard you're using.

Personally I wouldn't transfer files over networks unless you've got gigabit connectivity. Otherwise it's going to be a slow process for large files.

 

[Furyous]

Wait is the USB storage connected directly to the QNAP? Is it connected to your computer? Is it connected to some other computer that you're connecting to remotely to go to the QNAP? The path that the data flows through makes a world of a difference on how fast it transfers.

It's connected directly to the QNAP.

 

[Marty Chinn]

It's connected directly to the QNAP.

I'm not sure why you would think that's WiFi then. That should be reasonably fast.

 

[captive]

Does anyone have any advice on Raid 0 vs JBOD? I purchased the ts 451 as suggested and swapped out the seagate and western digital drives for two Hitachi 4TB solutions. Now I am in quite the situation. Should i use JBOD or Raid 0 for backing up files and as a digital media server?

nothing wrong with either as long as you know the risks. If you did JBOD I would at least setup some sync software to sync one direction from one drive to another. Or backup to the cloud.

I have RAID 0 on my FreeNAS, but everything on it is either backed up to carbonite or replicated to another device that is JBOD.

Couldn't you just map it as a networked drive and point the destination to there when ripping? I don't see why you couldn't rip directly to it.

Yes, via CIFS or iscsi. I rip all my Blu-rays directly to the LUN they live on from DVDFAB.

 

[ShowDog]

So I've been thinking about putting together a Mini-ITX system to set up a NAS with 4x4GB drives. The startup costs make this a difficult proposition for me. And I got to thinking, I have a 3570 system with 6 drive bays, a big PS and great cooling. Why couldn't I just set up a RAID in there seperate from my boot drive and an additional PC storage drive? Its not an inefficient system aside from the video card. I don't know anything about setting up a RAID in Win 7 but I understand it can be done.

What are the downsides / problems to setting up a RAID and sharing as a network drive on my existing Win 7 desktop PC?

 

[industrian]

What are the downsides / problems to setting up a RAID and sharing as a network drive on my existing Win 7 desktop PC?

What are the software RAID options in Windows 7? I think you can only do spanned drives without redundancy, but I've never done it before so I might be wrong.

The main reason I'd say is power requirements and noise. Modern NAS are incredibly energy efficient, with the only noise being from the hard drives.

 

[TarpitCarnivore]

So I've been thinking about putting together a Mini-ITX system to set up a NAS with 4x4GB drives. The startup costs make this a difficult proposition for me. And I got to thinking, I have a 3570 system with 6 drive bays, a big PS and great cooling. Why couldn't I just set up a RAID in there seperate from my boot drive and an additional PC storage drive? Its not an inefficient system aside from the video card. I don't know anything about setting up a RAID in Win 7 but I understand it can be done.

What are the downsides / problems to setting up a RAID and sharing as a network drive on my existing Win 7 desktop PC?

If this is really want you want to do then maybe something like Flexraid may be a good option?

 

[Deleted member 12837]

I'm glad that suggestion worked for getting most of your stuff recovered. Did you have data duplication turned on the WHS? If so, there's unlikely anything on that last drive that you don't have already cuz in theory the data should have been on two different drives. If data duplication wasn't turned on, then yes it's possible there is stuff on there. WHS is supposed to use that drive last for putting data on, but if you were pretty full then there's likely data on there that you need to recover.

WHS splits the system drive into two partitions. The first is the C drive which is the system, which is the 20-30GB you see, and then the other partition is D which has the drive extender data on there. From everything I've read, you should be able to still just hook it up and read it. If the drive was going bad and that's why the WHS was dying, then it's possible that the data might not be accessible. I would try finding a Windows computer to see if you can plug it in and see the second partition rather than on a Mac. Also you need to make sure hidden files are viewable in Windows because WHS stores the data in a hidden folder.

I've tried a quick Google search and nothing seemed unique about making it hard to get the data off the system drive. Good luck.

I haven't managed to snag a Windows machine yet, but I am now able to access both the DATA and SYS drives. I can get into the DE directory on the DATA drive, but when I try to "ls" I get the following:

ls: DEguid.txt: Resource busy
ls: folders: Resource busy
ls: shares: Resource busy

I can't "cd" into "folders" or "shares" or even see what's inside of them, it's always the "Resource busy" message. I've never had that come up when trying to read a file and directory, only when writing or deleting, and Google hasn't been helpful. Hoping maybe you might have an idea, otherwise I might just abandon the drive and hope that there isn't anything on there that wasn't duplicated on one of the other drives I did recover, for whatever reason.

 

[komarkaze]

Hi everyone. I bought a 3TB WD My Cloud NAS last week because my iMac ran out of space for my media files. I want to be able to stream to my Xbox 360 and iMac simulatenously.

At first, I copied the music, video and photo files to the Shared Music, Shared Videos and Shared Photos folders with no sub folders. My Xbox 360 was able to view all the media files successfully, but my iMac could not see the music through iTunes. Then I wiped all the music and used the iTunes Organize Library function to set the library path to the NAS. I had to copy some config files over as well to finally have my iTunes read from the NAS. However when I checked my Xbox 360, it had problems reading all the media files now that they were in subfolders.

Does anyone what settings I need to tweak to get my iMac iTunes and the Xbox 360 to read from the NAS?

 

[Aselith]

PS3 media server is fantastic for streaming to PS3.

http://www.ps3mediaserver.org/

 

[Raistlin]

I need to read through this thread ... looks fun.



Anyway for me, used to use Windows Home Server. Have now reconditioned it (HP MediaSmart Servers) to use unRAID

 

[Valkyr Junkie]

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...0050hnc_nrsn_5tb_desktop_networking_hard.html

5TB WD Red drives for $179/ea using promo code SHOPEB412. Best price I've seen this "deal season."

 

[captive]

I need to read through this thread ... looks fun.



Anyway for me, used to use Windows Home Server. Have now reconditioned it (HP MediaSmart Servers) to use unRAID

I'm likely going to switch from my FreeNAS to a Server 2012 R2 server with the file and storage services installed. There are some really cool features in it.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...0050hnc_nrsn_5tb_desktop_networking_hard.html

5TB WD Red drives for $179/ea using promo code SHOPEB412. Best price I've seen this "deal season."

Nice, thanks for posting.

 

[Marty Chinn]

If you know anyone who works at Western Digital, see if they're willing to get some drives for you. The employee discount is absolutely insane. Seriously mind blowing insane.

 

[MD1032]

Greetings and wishes for a happy new year!

I want to setup a Raid6 (5x2TB) with a Microserver N54L (i can find one at 200€ here at Greece) and i wanted to ask you if someone has done that with hardware raid controller.

I was thinking buying perc6 from ebay (EU) but the only drawback is the limitation of 2TB drives (not that much a deal breaker since i don't know if i can afford to get 5x3TB disks) but is there any other reliable/cheap alternative that i may use with N54L?

Thanx in advance!

 

[Pachimari]

I think I need serious help. I have a Synology DS411j NAS with my ripped Bluray's on there, but I still have like 1.7TB left on it. The thing is, I'm running Plex Media Server on the NAS, but it have become extremely slow, and quite often it loses connection.

Is this because the CPU is too slow and below the recommended spec for Plex? Or is it because of my weak router?

Right now, I can't load any movies, as it keeps losing connection.

 

[TheDude108]

Its probably trying to transcode the bluray rips. Check your transcoding settings in Plex to see what resolution and bitrate local playback is set to.

 

[Pachimari]

Its probably trying to transcode the bluray rips. Check your transcoding settings in Plex to see what resolution and bitrate local playback is set to.

But it says here on Plex's support list (of course I can't find the list now), that the DS411j doesn't support transcoding with Plex.

 

[Marty Chinn]

I think I need serious help. I have a Synology DS411j NAS with my ripped Bluray's on there, but I still have like 1.7TB left on it. The thing is, I'm running Plex Media Server on the NAS, but it have become extremely slow, and quite often it loses connection.

Is this because the CPU is too slow and below the recommended spec for Plex? Or is it because of my weak router?

Right now, I can't load any movies, as it keeps losing connection.

What router are you using and how are you connecting everything?

 

[Pachimari]

My desktop runs Plex Home Theater, and is connected to my router (60/60 bit) with an ethernet cable. My NAS is connected to my router with an ethernet cable as well.

My router is a d-link go-rt-n150.

Could the router be my problem?

 

[Marty Chinn]

My desktop runs Plex Home Theater, and is connected to my router (60/60 bit) with an ethernet cable. My NAS is connected to my router with an ethernet cable as well.

My router is a d-link go-rt-n150.

Could the router be my problem?

A simple thing to test is to bypass Plex and see if you can just play the file over the network. I'd grab something like Media Player Classic if you don't have it already and just navigate to the file on your network and try to play it. If it plays fine, it's unlikely to be the router.

 

[crazygambit]

My desktop runs Plex Home Theater, and is connected to my router (60/60 bit) with an ethernet cable. My NAS is connected to my router with an ethernet cable as well.

My router is a d-link go-rt-n150.

Could the router be my problem?

Try running the Plex server on your desktop (or better yet, use Kodi). For movie viewing I just use my NAS as massive storage, I don't really want it doing any processing whatsoever.

 

[Pachimari]

I'll try run Plex Media Server on the desktop. I just thought it would be convenient having it on the NAS? But I see it's processing and doing work then?

[edit]
Just installed it on my Windows 7 desktop. Just waiting for it to start up.

 

[crazygambit]

I'll try run Plex Media Server on the desktop. I just thought it would be convenient having it on the NAS? But I see it's processing and doing work then?

It's a possibility, but it could be a number of other things. It's a good way to troubleshoot though.

Also maybe you could be more specific about what "becoming extremely slow" means. The movie playback is choppy? or the GUI? Does sound stutter as well?

If Plex server on the desktop doesn't work well, you should try Kodi to troubleshoot. Just add a small subset of your library to test.

Ripped bluerays might be too much for your bandwidth. I don't know if that router has a Gigabit ethernet port (I assume the NAS does, but I don't know about that model either).

Edit: I looked at your router's specs. You definitely want one with a Gigabit ethernet port. It could definitely be a bandwidth issue for bluray isos.

 

[Pachimari]

The movie playback is always fine. But it takes forever for me to just sync a movie in the library and changing a poster, which goes much faster on my desktop I see.

Everything in Plex Home Theater is fine. No stutter and sound has always been fine.

I only had trouble with the Media Server because it had become extremely slow to load things on the NAS.

[edit]
Now that I remember. The thing is, that my desktop computer always loses the connection to my Plex library on the NAS. Because I have it set up as a P://Plex folder, but because it loses the connection, I have to log in every time. Very inconvenient.

 

[Marty Chinn]

I wouldn't think it's a bandwidth issue. The average BluRay is around 25 to 30mbps, with a peak of 40mbps. Even knowing you won't get full speed, he should be able to hit that easily with a 100mbit connection.